Synopsis

Nafas (Niloufar Pazira) is a reporter who was born in Afghanistan, but fled with her family to Canada when she was a child. However, her sister wasn’t so lucky; she lost her legs to a land mine while young, and when Nafas and her family left the country, her sister was accidentally left behind.

Nafas receives a letter from her sister announcing that she’s decided to commit suicide during the final eclipse before the dawn of the 21st century; desperate to spare her sister’s life, Nafas makes haste to Afghanistan, where she joins a caravan of refugees who, for a variety of reasons, are returning to the war-torn nation. As Nafas searches for her sister, she soon gets a clear and disturbing portrait of the toll the Taliban regime has taken upon its people.

Full Description

Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s visually striking journey through Afghanistan takes the form of a journalist, Nafas, returning to the country after she receives a letter from her sister saying she intends to commit suicide during an eclipse of the sun. Can the now Canadian journalist save her sister in time? This is by no means a fast paced adventure thriller, but it is, if you like, working against nature’s own clock. It gives the film a hook upon which to hang a story that wants to combine documentary observation with narrative tension. As Nafas tries to reach Kandahar, the director offers us a pessimistic travelogue of limbless civilians, religiously indoctrinated kids carrying Kalashnikovs, and women cowering inside their burkas, all the while making us aware this is a woman in a hurry.

Makhmalbaf remains perhaps the most compositionally precise of Iranian film makers, and anybody who knows A Moment of Silence, Gabbeh or The Cyclist can’t help but admire the way he uses colour to suggest a fresco of visual possibilities. However, with dialogue that seems less delivered than mouthed, images that are visually astonishingly yet close to cliché, and a story device that allows the character to witness various atrocities and horrors along the way, the film falls well short of the masterpiece we might have expected.

The prosthetic limbs that fall from the sky, for example, as crippled Afghans rush towards them, feels like an image too demanding of pathos, too insistently asking us to see the tragic in the beautiful. It is simultaneously one of the most memorable images in contemporary cinema; and yet at the same time one of the most trite. It is consistent with the idiosyncratic sublime central to much great art cinema - of the statue in La Dolce Vita, the huge sculpted hand in Landscape in the Mist - the capsized ship in Uzak, and yet the image is surprisingly un-troubling considering the fundamental horror of the scene. It isn’t just that Makhmalbaf pursues the beautiful out of the tragic, but that he wants us to feel the tragedy while admiring the beauty. This isn’t too far removed from the sort of kitsch practised by the kite scenes and wondrous landscapes in the recent The Kite Runner.

But there are other great visual moments here. None more so than the array of colours we see as women gather together and form a stunning image of reds, yellows and blues as Makhmalbaf utilises the head to toe burka as an image not just of ready oppression but a pictorial richness we can almost gorge on.

What is finally most interesting about Kandahar is the way it plays with the word. Once a signifier of silk road freedom as people would pass through a hippy trail of exciting possibilities; then a base for Taliban oppression, the film wants to suggest the former in the visual delights; the latter in constant wake-up calls of brutal oppression. Makhmalbaf’s film remains a work to get to grips with.

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